Radio Shack & Peter Gabriel

I was on the hunt for some robot parts this morning. Much to my chagrin, I’ve discovered that Radio Shack has lost all touch with its roots.It was like walking into a watered down circuit city with off-brand consumer electronics (an RCA sound system… yeah… no thanks) at premium prices. The tinkerer’s section was relegated to a very sad corner of the store, with the components being sold individually in a open/close chest of drawers. Not at all like I remembered…
Giving up Radio Shack, I crossed the street to go to Fry’s, and although their selection was substantially better (several aisles dedicated to nothing but components… one half of one aisle ICs, alone), I quickly determined their prices for this sort of thing ($1.25 for 5 resistors… I don’t think so) relegate only emergency purchases.

So internet shopping is going to have to come to the rescue again. I have some very unique and specific parts I need for this robot I’m currently working on, so I would have had to mail-order anyway.

I’m going to have to take a trip to the junkyard before Tuesday, by the way, to find a few more parts for Approximation. when I get better at scavenging, I’ll probably spend a lot less money buying brand new stuff when I could just tear apart junky appliances or bend, melt, and weld scrap metal.

Back to fry’s: Not wanting to waste a trip, I started browsing the dvd/cd section and I remembered that Erick recommended Peter Gabrial’s new album, Up.

It’s been 10 years since Peter Gabriel has released something, so even though I’m a big fan, you can’t blame me for not jumping all over it on its release date.

I probably would count “In your eyes” as one of my all-time favorite songs.

So I bought the cd (again, at Fry’s premium price) and eagerily popped it in my Mac as I started tweaking some of the back-end engine stuff for Pathogen on my PC.

First time through, I was a little disappointed. I was definitely expecting something like Us or So. It’s got a much more updated feel to it (especially compared to, say, Passion) with electronic noises, electric guitars, etc.

Being a PG fan, I knew that you really have to let his music grow on you. It’s very complicated, with multiple layers and lots of stuff going on… It’s not stuff you can listen to passively until you figure it out.

Plus, no matter what, you have to love Peter Gabriel’s voice- lots of emotion.

So I hit the play button again and went through a second time while sketching abstract shapes (a little less mind consuming than trying to track down bugs in the math behind my program or sketching the human body).

I’m definitely starting to like it. Especially “I Grieve.”

It’s now synched on my iPod, so I’ll probably run through it several times next week.

Updated: 10.05.02 – 23:48 Fixed spelling of Peter Gabriel